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MS Access Design Technique

Microsoft Access is a wonderful tool for application development. In fact, it is the best in terms of price and development time. A few hours of work, and you can deliver an application that will save considerable time in obtaining the correct data. In addition, it is easy to maintain and grow in accordance with a user's changing needs. This assumes a developer who has extensive knowledge of MS Access; otherwise it can take much longer to get good results. Because MS Access is so rich in features and functionality, it takes time to master.

I would like to share a method that would speed up your development efforts.

Take a Text Box control, for example. While designing a form or report and placing a Text Box, the Label control is attached to the Text Box. Sometimes, this is not what you want, so you delete the label. If you have many Text Boxes that do not need labels, it can amount to a lot of clicking and deleting. To avoid this, you need to change default behavior of the control. You can do that by opening the Form or Report Designer, selecting the control on the Ribbon Control tab and then opening a Property Sheet on the Tools tab. Change any property and close Property Sheet. In our example, change Auto Label property from Yes to No. Close the Property Sheet and continue designing. From now on, if you place a Text Box on the form or report, no label will be attached. You can change it back if you want later.

Do not forget to record default settings before doing any changes in case you want to go back to the default behavior.

Use this technique to set up a common look and feel for your application. For example, you can set font or background properties for Labels and Text Boxes. Adjust LabelX and LabelY properties of the TextBox control to set up the position of the attached label.

Be aware that control properties in Form Designer and Report Designer do not overlap. If you change the Auto Label property for a Text Box in Form Designer, it would affect only Text Boxes that you put on the forms. If you need to have the same feature for reports, you have to open a Report Designed and change the Auto Label property for Text Box control.

Remember, while designing form or report, using Property Sheet for controls on the Ribbon, you can alter default properties of the controls. As a result, you do not have to adjust a control's properties after you put them on the form or report.

All Comments

An important one

Learn what one is and how they work, before you start clicking all over a GUI expressly designed to attract the incompetent and hide the important reality.

Access is a wonderful power user tool, and pretty good for small scale prototyping.

As soon as you ned to scale up, volume of data, transactions, functions, users, or developers, it's failings become glaringly obvious.It's a single user desktop GUI, with some cripplingly misleading enhancements.

Add in the fact that it's aimed at those not well versed in design and implementation, and you have a recipe for disaster.

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